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The next question is whether perception is concerned only
with need.
The soul, isolated, has no sense-perception; sensations go with
the body; sensation itself therefore must occur by means of the
body to which the sensations are due; it must be something
brought about by association with the body.
Thus either sensation occurs in a soul compelled to follow upon
bodily states- since every graver bodily experience reaches at
last to soul- or sensation is a device by which a cause is dealt
with before it becomes so great as actually to injure us or even
before it has begun to make contact.
At this, sense-impressions would aim at utility. They may serve
also to knowledge, but that could be service only to some being
not living in knowledge but stupefied as the result of a
disaster, and the victim of a Lethe calling for constant
reminding: they would be useless to any being free from either
need or forgetfulness. This This reflection enlarges the enquiry:
it is no longer a question of earth alone, but of the whole
star-system, all the heavens, the kosmos entire. For it would
follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt from
modification, sense-perception would occur in every part having
relation to any other part: in a whole, however- having relation
only to itself, immune, universally self-directed and
self-possessing- what perception could there be?
Granted that the percipient must act through an organ and that
this organ must be different from the object perceived, then the
universe, as an All, can have [no sensation since it has] no
organ distinct from object: it can have self-awareness, as we
have; but sense-perception, the constant attendant of another
order, it cannot have.
Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the
normal is the sense of something intruding from without: but
besides this, we have the apprehension of one member by another;
why then should not the All, by means of what is stationary in
it, perceive that region of itself which is in movement, that is
to say the earth and the earth's content?
Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other
regions of the All; what, then, need prevent the All from having,
in some appropriate way, the perception of those changes? In
addition to that self-contemplating vision vested in its
stationary part, may it not have a seeing power like that of an
eye able to announce to the All-Soul what has passed before it?
Even granted that it is entirely unaffected by its lower, why,
still, should it not see like an eye, ensouled as it is, all
lightsome?
Still: "eyes were not necessary to it," we read. If this meant
simply that nothing is left to be seen outside of the All, still
there is the inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent
it seeing what constitutes itself: if the meaning is that such
self-vision could serve to no use, we may think that it has
vision not as a main intention for vision's sake but as a
necessary concomitant of its characteristic nature; it is
difficult to conceive why such a body should be incapable of
seeing.
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